Motorail and Motorsport
Discussion
dukeboy749r said:
In some respects, we really have gone backward in regards to this sort of inter-connected rail and road, not forward as we might have expected.
I know what you mean. Looking at this video https://youtu.be/UyHMKNFnqEo with ferries, container handling, motorail and the like it was a bold vision for the future.SD.
shed driver said:
That was excellent....as you say, nostalgia overload 
The film might have been released/produced in 1969, but the event took place in 1968.
Love the works Escort Twin Cam 'borrowed' for the event by a motoring journalist
We used the Calais > Nice Motorail route for our honeymoon. Nice overnight journey with a cabin to ourselves, although you don’t really get a great night’s sleep with all the noises and vibrations.
One curiosity of the time was the risk of trackside thieves, who sometimes looted the holidaymakers’ vehicles when the train had to stop in the early hours for a scheduled crew change etc. The poor victims would only find out that their belongings had been nicked on arrival in Nice. Not an ideal start to your holiday.
One curiosity of the time was the risk of trackside thieves, who sometimes looted the holidaymakers’ vehicles when the train had to stop in the early hours for a scheduled crew change etc. The poor victims would only find out that their belongings had been nicked on arrival in Nice. Not an ideal start to your holiday.
Marvellous stuff, especialy the double headed Warships which I presume were filmed on the Golden Hind service prior to the introduction of the Westerns?
Of course they may have been NBL (rather than BR Swindon) examples in which case one would have rescued the other after it broke down...
I'll get my anorak
Of course they may have been NBL (rather than BR Swindon) examples in which case one would have rescued the other after it broke down...
I'll get my anorak
aeropilot said:
Love the works Escort Twin Cam 'borrowed' for the event by a motoring journalist
John Davenport was not exactly your average 'motoring journalist'... he was co-driver to some of the world's top rally drivers https://www.ewrc-results.com/coprofile/29462-john-...
Bert Cheese said:
Marvellous stuff, especialy the double headed Warships which I presume were filmed on the Golden Hind service prior to the introduction of the Westerns?
Of course they may have been NBL (rather than BR Swindon) examples in which case one would have rescued the other after it broke down...
I'll get my anorak
Of course they may have been NBL (rather than BR Swindon) examples in which case one would have rescued the other after it broke down...
I'll get my anorak
The poor NBL made great steam locos but their diesel offerings were dire!
matchmaker said:
The poor NBL made great steam locos but their diesel offerings were dire!
In the States, Alco and Baldwin were both wrong-footed by the unexpected rapidity of dieselisation. Alco especially was a pioneer, developing the first successful diesel-electric switcher and the first viable road-switcher years before anyone else (and with GE handling the electrical machinery). They knew that diesel would eventually replace steam in the USA, but judged that it would take at least 20 years and that steam would remain preferred for heavy freight traffic for many years to come. They also banked on the export market preferring less efficient but much less capital-intensive steam traction for the forseeable future.
They were wrong - EMD gazumped them. Having struggled to crack both the switcher and road-switcher markets, EMD jumped the queue and produced the FT in 1939 which was a main-line 5,400hp quad-unit set perfectly capable of displacing even the largest steam locos from heavy freight duties. In the years after WW2 the major American railroads dieselised very rapidly, with the first eliminating steam in 1950 and most of them (the exceptions being railroads in the east which had easy and cheap supplies of coal) entirely dieselising by the late 1950s.
Baldwin and Alco remained wedded to 'steam era' thinking, producing individual runs of locomotives, tailored from a loose standardised design template for each railroad's needs. Their diesel locos tended to be over-built, heavy and rather rough-and-ready. EMD drew on GM's experience of the car industry and offered a fixed catalogue of four basic models at any one time (switcher, road switcher, mainline freight, mainline passenger) and pretty much the only options were the motor gearing, how many headlamps it had and what colour it was painted. Standardised models meant EMD could offer shorter delivery times, lower costs per unit and greatly standardised parts. As a railroad bought more EMD products, that standardisation paid increasingly big dividends because so many of the parts and maintenance procedures were interchangeable between all the various loco types.
EMD also drew on GM doctrine of the time that reliability and low service costs/requirements were the key to success. EMD's locomotive engineering was quite conservative and they already dropped behind Alco in terms of power output by the mid-1950s. Alcos were repeatedly shown to be more powerful, produce more tractive effort and use less fuel per horsepower than the equivalent EMDs, but the EMDs were equally proven to be more reliable and cheaper to run overall.
You can see the same pattern in the UK - the dominant players in diesel traction were English Electric and Brush, plus the BR workshops licensing designs from Sulzer. Firms like Beyer-Peacock were able to transition to assembling locomotives from bits designed and produced by others, and continued their reputation for quality (the record of the B-P built Hymeks and Class 37s speaks for themselves). BRCW never built a steam loco but successfully designed and built diesel locos around bought-in Sulzer engines and (less reliable) Crompton electrics...until BR sank them by pinching their Type 4 prototype design and giving the production contract to someone else and screwing them over with the narrow-bodied Class 33/2s. But North British never got away from the 'metal bashing' heavy engineering practices that had served them so well before, and they made the unfortunate choice to license a family of MAN prime movers that were not that great in terms of reliability in the first place, even when built and maintained by Germans, and certainly didn't take well to being converted to Imperial measurements, built by people used to smashing together steam locos, and then maintained in dirty, coal-dust-infested sheds.
A lot of the early BR diesels' problems came from manufacturers working to fairly terrible and misguided BR specs. When BR specified what would become the Class 40s, English Electric was already building six-axle 2400hp locomotives for export. But BR's civil engineers, still in 'steam mode' didn't like the idea of high-speed locomotives running without leading guide trucks and the (botched) tests at Rugby had 'proven' that they only needed 2000hp. So EE gave the customer what they asked for - an overweight, underpowered, eight-axle beast that was obsolete even before the last had been built
Silver Smudger said:
I wish we still had Motorail in Europe - Would love to take my car for a tour around some nice roads and countryside in Italy, but don't want to drive the motorway / autoroute all the way there and back - Boring waste of a day or so each way!
I suspect the rise of cheap but comfortable and reliable cars for middling journeys and cheap flights/hire cars for longer have made it something most people have little call for.I wonder if there'd be enough interest to make a periodic or charter service viable - the Eurotunnel already runs TGV equipment so provided any tunnels/bridges can accommodate the car transporter coaches - Alps might be an issue but south of France viable? - could you just slap a few cabin/lounge coaches on and go?
2xChevrons said:
I do find it interesting that, around the world and with very few exceptions, not a single one of the great steam locomotive builders successfully made the transition to modern traction. The few that did were either taken over by non-traditional firms (Beyer Peacock which became part of English Electric and remained an assembler rather than a designer/producer), were part of diversified conglomerates (Mitsubishi in Japan) or managed to make the transition but never reached the same scale and market share as they had in steam days (Henschel in Germany).
In the States, Alco and Baldwin were both wrong-footed by the unexpected rapidity of dieselisation. Alco especially was a pioneer, developing the first successful diesel-electric switcher and the first viable road-switcher years before anyone else (and with GE handling the electrical machinery). They knew that diesel would eventually replace steam in the USA, but judged that it would take at least 20 years and that steam would remain preferred for heavy freight traffic for many years to come. They also banked on the export market preferring less efficient but much less capital-intensive steam traction for the forseeable future.
They were wrong - EMD gazumped them. Having struggled to crack both the switcher and road-switcher markets, EMD jumped the queue and produced the FT in 1939 which was a main-line 5,400hp quad-unit set perfectly capable of displacing even the largest steam locos from heavy freight duties. In the years after WW2 the major American railroads dieselised very rapidly, with the first eliminating steam in 1950 and most of them (the exceptions being railroads in the east which had easy and cheap supplies of coal) entirely dieselising by the late 1950s.
Baldwin and Alco remained wedded to 'steam era' thinking, producing individual runs of locomotives, tailored from a loose standardised design template for each railroad's needs. Their diesel locos tended to be over-built, heavy and rather rough-and-ready. EMD drew on GM's experience of the car industry and offered a fixed catalogue of four basic models at any one time (switcher, road switcher, mainline freight, mainline passenger) and pretty much the only options were the motor gearing, how many headlamps it had and what colour it was painted. Standardised models meant EMD could offer shorter delivery times, lower costs per unit and greatly standardised parts. As a railroad bought more EMD products, that standardisation paid increasingly big dividends because so many of the parts and maintenance procedures were interchangeable between all the various loco types.
EMD also drew on GM doctrine of the time that reliability and low service costs/requirements were the key to success. EMD's locomotive engineering was quite conservative and they already dropped behind Alco in terms of power output by the mid-1950s. Alcos were repeatedly shown to be more powerful, produce more tractive effort and use less fuel per horsepower than the equivalent EMDs, but the EMDs were equally proven to be more reliable and cheaper to run overall.
You can see the same pattern in the UK - the dominant players in diesel traction were English Electric and Brush, plus the BR workshops licensing designs from Sulzer. Firms like Beyer-Peacock were able to transition to assembling locomotives from bits designed and produced by others, and continued their reputation for quality (the record of the B-P built Hymeks and Class 37s speaks for themselves). BRCW never built a steam loco but successfully designed and built diesel locos around bought-in Sulzer engines and (less reliable) Crompton electrics...until BR sank them by pinching their Type 4 prototype design and giving the production contract to someone else and screwing them over with the narrow-bodied Class 33/2s. But North British never got away from the 'metal bashing' heavy engineering practices that had served them so well before, and they made the unfortunate choice to license a family of MAN prime movers that were not that great in terms of reliability in the first place, even when built and maintained by Germans, and certainly didn't take well to being converted to Imperial measurements, built by people used to smashing together steam locos, and then maintained in dirty, coal-dust-infested sheds.
A lot of the early BR diesels' problems came from manufacturers working to fairly terrible and misguided BR specs. When BR specified what would become the Class 40s, English Electric was already building six-axle 2400hp locomotives for export. But BR's civil engineers, still in 'steam mode' didn't like the idea of high-speed locomotives running without leading guide trucks and the (botched) tests at Rugby had 'proven' that they only needed 2000hp. So EE gave the customer what they asked for - an overweight, underpowered, eight-axle beast that was obsolete even before the last had been built
Thank you for that concise and genuinely interesting summary 2cv man. I've never much been into diesels, my opinion most probably informed by this character in the first book I ever bought, aged 3:In the States, Alco and Baldwin were both wrong-footed by the unexpected rapidity of dieselisation. Alco especially was a pioneer, developing the first successful diesel-electric switcher and the first viable road-switcher years before anyone else (and with GE handling the electrical machinery). They knew that diesel would eventually replace steam in the USA, but judged that it would take at least 20 years and that steam would remain preferred for heavy freight traffic for many years to come. They also banked on the export market preferring less efficient but much less capital-intensive steam traction for the forseeable future.
They were wrong - EMD gazumped them. Having struggled to crack both the switcher and road-switcher markets, EMD jumped the queue and produced the FT in 1939 which was a main-line 5,400hp quad-unit set perfectly capable of displacing even the largest steam locos from heavy freight duties. In the years after WW2 the major American railroads dieselised very rapidly, with the first eliminating steam in 1950 and most of them (the exceptions being railroads in the east which had easy and cheap supplies of coal) entirely dieselising by the late 1950s.
Baldwin and Alco remained wedded to 'steam era' thinking, producing individual runs of locomotives, tailored from a loose standardised design template for each railroad's needs. Their diesel locos tended to be over-built, heavy and rather rough-and-ready. EMD drew on GM's experience of the car industry and offered a fixed catalogue of four basic models at any one time (switcher, road switcher, mainline freight, mainline passenger) and pretty much the only options were the motor gearing, how many headlamps it had and what colour it was painted. Standardised models meant EMD could offer shorter delivery times, lower costs per unit and greatly standardised parts. As a railroad bought more EMD products, that standardisation paid increasingly big dividends because so many of the parts and maintenance procedures were interchangeable between all the various loco types.
EMD also drew on GM doctrine of the time that reliability and low service costs/requirements were the key to success. EMD's locomotive engineering was quite conservative and they already dropped behind Alco in terms of power output by the mid-1950s. Alcos were repeatedly shown to be more powerful, produce more tractive effort and use less fuel per horsepower than the equivalent EMDs, but the EMDs were equally proven to be more reliable and cheaper to run overall.
You can see the same pattern in the UK - the dominant players in diesel traction were English Electric and Brush, plus the BR workshops licensing designs from Sulzer. Firms like Beyer-Peacock were able to transition to assembling locomotives from bits designed and produced by others, and continued their reputation for quality (the record of the B-P built Hymeks and Class 37s speaks for themselves). BRCW never built a steam loco but successfully designed and built diesel locos around bought-in Sulzer engines and (less reliable) Crompton electrics...until BR sank them by pinching their Type 4 prototype design and giving the production contract to someone else and screwing them over with the narrow-bodied Class 33/2s. But North British never got away from the 'metal bashing' heavy engineering practices that had served them so well before, and they made the unfortunate choice to license a family of MAN prime movers that were not that great in terms of reliability in the first place, even when built and maintained by Germans, and certainly didn't take well to being converted to Imperial measurements, built by people used to smashing together steam locos, and then maintained in dirty, coal-dust-infested sheds.
A lot of the early BR diesels' problems came from manufacturers working to fairly terrible and misguided BR specs. When BR specified what would become the Class 40s, English Electric was already building six-axle 2400hp locomotives for export. But BR's civil engineers, still in 'steam mode' didn't like the idea of high-speed locomotives running without leading guide trucks and the (botched) tests at Rugby had 'proven' that they only needed 2000hp. So EE gave the customer what they asked for - an overweight, underpowered, eight-axle beast that was obsolete even before the last had been built
"Your worthy Sir Topham Hatt thinks I need to learn. He is mistaken. We Diesels don't need to learn. We know everything. We come to a yard and improve it. We are revolutionary." – Diesel
Reading that now, I think Awdry was possibly influenced by the Daleks.
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